MILWAUKEE (WI)
SNAP Wisconsin
(An edited version of this Op Ed appeared in Sunday’s Milwaukee Journal Sentinel “Your Views”.)
War over Weakland is over
By Peter Isely
There was a weird phenomenon that persisted for decades after the surrender of imperial Japan to the allies in 1945 that became known in popular Japanese culture as “nipponhei” or “holdouts”.
Naponhei were Japanese soldiers who either adamantly refused to believe that Japan had lost the war and continued to fight, or were so cut off from communications on remote islands in the Pacific that they never received the news. The last confirmed nipponhei was one Hiroo Onodoa who lived in the jungles of the Philippines were he successfully evaded what he thought was capture for almost 30 years. When Onodoa finally marched out of the jungle and formally surrendered he was wearing an immaculately kept dress uniform. He was age 52.
As a survivor of childhood sexual assault by a priest of the Milwaukee archdiocese, it is astonishing to read Todd Robert Murphy’s strange nipponhei like revisionist history of Archbishop Rembert Weakland (“A reappraisal of Archbishop Rembert Weakland”).
No one seems to have told Murphy that for nearly 25 years Weakland planned, directed and implemented a wide spread and systematic cover up of sex crimes against children by dozens of Catholic priests and religious clerics. Weakland’s record is one of the best documented in the entire history of the now global sex abuse crisis in the church, including tens of thousands of pages of recently court ordered released pages of internal church files, hundreds of hours of depositions of top church officials (including Weakland) and serial offenders, and the direct testimony, reports or admissions of what must now be well over 1,000 victims, among them 200 deaf youngsters by the infamous Fr. Lawrence Murphy. That number is likely a fraction of the actual total, since most victims of childhood rape and sexual assault never come forward and report the crime.
A few years ago, I received a call from a survivor of one of these predator priests that Weakland shuffled and sheltered around the archdiocese. He had a brother, let’s call him Michael, who was also molested by the same priest. Michael had just gone to the local Catholic cemetery to visit his mother’s grave. Michael also took his grandfather’s shotgun with him. He took his life, on his mother’s grave. The body, I was told, could only be identified because a business card from the archdiocese was found on his person. Michael, for whatever reason, had seeking some kind of help or relief from the archdiocese. The priest who assaulted Michael was known by Weakland and his second in charge, Bishop Richard Sklba, to have been a child sex offender.
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